She had to shout over the abrasive thump, thump, thump of the boat, even though the thruster was nearly silent.
“I’ll reach the node in four or five minutes. Can’t see Weir, but I don’t think it matters.”
“We can see him. He’s still headed for the node.”
“Good. Can you spare some more boats, in case he decides to make a run for another node?”
“They’ll be leaving in a minute or so. I’m waking everyone I can.”
“What about the other delegates?”
Sivaraksa did not answer her immediately. “Most are still asleep. I have Amesha Crane and Simon Matsubara in my office, however.”
“Let me speak to them.”
“Just a moment,” he said, after the same brief hesitation.
“Crane here,” said the woman.
“I think I’m chasing Weir. Can you confirm that?”
“He isn’t accounted for,” she told Naqi. “But it’ll be a few minutes until we can be certain it’s him.”
“I’m not expecting a surprise. Weir already had a question mark over him, Amesha. We were waiting for him to try something.”
“Were you?” Perhaps it was her imagination, but Crane sounded genuinely surprised. “Why? What had he done?”
“You don’t know?”
“No…” Crane trailed off.
“He was one of us,” Matsubara said. “A good… delegate. We had no reason to distrust him.”
Perhaps Naqi was imagining this as well, but it almost sounded as if Matsubara had intended to say “disciple” rather than “delegate.”
Crane came back on the radio. “Please do your best to apprehend him, Naqi. This is a source of great embarrassment to us. He mustn’t do any harm.”
Naqi gunned the boat harder, no longer bothering to avoid the smaller patches of organic matter. “No,” she said. “He mustn’t.”
Something changed ahead.
“Naqi?” It was Jotah Sivaraksa’s voice.
“What?”
“Weir’s slowed his boat. From our vantage point it looks as if he’s reached the perimeter of the node. He seems to be circumnavigating it.”
“I can’t see him yet. He must be picking the best spot to dive in.”
“But it won’t work, will it?” Sivaraksa asked. “There has to be an element of cooperation with the Jugglers. They have to invite the swimmer to enter the sea, or nothing happens.”
“Maybe he doesn’t realise that,” Naqi said, under her breath. It was of no concern to her how closely Weir was adhering to the usual method of initiating Juggler communion. Even if the Jugglers did not cooperate-even if all Weir did was flounder in thick green water-there was no telling the hidden harm that might be done. She had already grudgingly accepted the acceleration of the closure operation. There was no way she was going to tolerate another upset, another unwanted perturbation of the experimental system. Not on her watch.
“He’s stopped,” Sivaraksa said excitedly. “Can you see him yet?”
Naqi stood up in her seat, even though she felt perilously out of balance. “Wait. Yes, I think so. I’ll be there in a minute or so.”
“What are you going to do?” Crane asked. “I hesitate to say it, but Weir may not respond to rational argument at this point. Simply requesting that he leave the water won’t necessarily work. Um, do you have a weapon?”
“Yes,” Naqi said. “I’m sitting in it.”
She did not allow herself to relax, but at least now she felt that the situation was slipping back into her control. She would kill Weir rather than have him contaminate the node.
His boat was visible now only as a smudge of white, intermittently popping up between folds and hummocks of shifting green. Her imagination sketched in the details. Weir would be preparing to swim, stripping off until he was naked or nearly so. Perhaps he would feel some kind of erotic charge as he prepared for immersion. She did not doubt that he would be apprehensive, and perhaps he would hesitate on the threshold of the act, teetering on the edge of the boat before committing himself to the water. But a fanatic desire had driven him this far and she doubted that it would fail him.
“Naqi…”
“Jotah?”
“Naqi, he’s moving again. He didn’t enter the water. He didn’t even look like he had any intention of swimming.”
“He saw I was coming. I take it he’s heading for the next closest node?”
“Perhaps…” But Jotah Sivaraksa sounded far from certain.
She saw the boat again. It was moving fast-much faster than it had appeared before-but that was only because she was now seeing lateral motion.
The next node was a distant island framed by the background of the Moat’s encircling rim. If he headed that way she would be hard behind him all the way there as well. No matter his desire to swim, he must realise that she could thwart his every attempt.
Naqi looked back. The twin towers framing the cut were smothered in a haze of sea mist, their geometric details smeared into a vague suggestion of haphazard complexity. They suggested teetering, stratified sea-stacks, million-year-old towers of weathered and eroded rock guarding the narrow passage to the open ocean. Beneath them, winking in and out of clarity, she saw three or four other boats making their way into the Moat. The ponderous teardrop of a passenger dirigible was nosing away from the side of one of the towers, the low dawn sun throwing golden highlights along the fluted lines of its gondola. Naqi made out the sleek deltoid of the Voice of Evening’s shuttle, but it was still parked where it had landed.
She looked back to the node where Weir had hesitated.
Something was happening.
The node had become vastly more active than a minute earlier. It resembled a green, steep-sided volcanic island that was undergoing some catastrophic seismic calamity. The entire mass of the node was trembling, rocking and throbbing with an eerie regularity. Concentric swells of disturbed water raced away from it, sickening troughs that made the speeding boat pitch and slide. Naqi slowed her boat, some instinct telling her that it was now largely futile to pursue Weir. Then she turned around so that she faced the node properly, and, cautiously, edged closer, ignoring the nausea she felt as the boat ducked and dived from crest to trough.
The node, like all nodes, had always shown a rich surface topology; fused hummocks and tendrils; fabulous domes and minarets and helter-skelters of organised biomass, linked and entangled by a telegraphic system of draping aerial tendrils. In any instant it resembled a human city-or, more properly, a fairy-tale human city-that had been efficiently smothered in green moss. The bright moving motes of sprites dodged through the interstices, the portholes and arches of the urban mass. The metropolitan structure only hinted at the node’s byzantine interior architecture, and much of that could only be glimpsed or implied.
But this node was like a city going insane. It was accelerating, running through cycles of urban renewal and redesign with indecent haste. Structures were evolving before Naqi’s eyes. She had seen change this rapid just before Mina was taken, but normally those kinds of changes happened too slowly to be seen at all, like the daily movement of shadows.
The throbbing had decreased, but the flickering change was now throwing out a steady, warm, malodorous breeze. And when she stopped the boat-she dared come no closer now-Naqi heard the node. It was like the whisper of a billion forest leaves presaging a summer storm.
Whatever was happening here, it was about to become catastrophic.
Some fundamental organisation had been lost. The changes were happening too quickly, with too little central coordination. Tendrils thrashed like whips, unable to connect to anything. They flailed against each other. Structures
